Mastering for Today's Digital Music Services

This is a special upgrade for owners of the original MasterCheck to obtain the MasterCheck 2.

Mix and Master for the listener - directly to Apple, Spotify, DAB Radio and TV specifications, MasterCheck will immediately reveal how your audio is going to sound to the listener, allowing you to produce with confidence and certainty.

MasterCheck is the complete solution for optimising your mixes for today’s music delivery services. Streaming apps, download stores, websites and podcasts all use data compression, loudness matching or both. These processes can affect your mixes in various undesirable ways: your loud punchy mix could end up quiet and flat, or suffer clipping or distortion. The good news is you don’t just have to mix for CD and hope for the best. MasterCheck reveals problems ahead of time, and enables you to deliver masters perfectly tuned for specific playout systems.

Mix and Master for the listener - directly to Apple, Spotify, DAB Radio and TV specifications, MasterCheck will immediately reveal how your audio is going to sound to the listener, allowing you to produce with confidence and certainty.

Cross Platform Mastering

How do people listen to the music you mix? You work hard to deliver masters that sound great at home, in the car or on earbuds, but that’s only half the story. How does your mix sound on Spotify, Apple Music or Google Play? What about YouTube, digital radio, or Beatport? MasterCheck will show you; giving you a unique advantage and enabling you to take back control of the listening experience. You’ll instantly hear how your tracks are affected by loudness matching algorithms on different devices and services, and you’ll know how your masters respond to different codecs and bandwidths.

One Plug-in, Complete Toolset

MasterCheck gives you the tools to make sure your mix reaches the listener sounding as you intended. Industry standard meters show the Loudness and PLR (dynamic range) of your mix and how they compare to your target platform. Loudness auditioning reveals any level changes and compression that will be applied. External reference auditioning and metering lets you A/B your master FX chain with other music or your uncompressed mix. True Peak Metering ensures you’re within the delivery spec and guarantees you’ll stay clip-free at later encoding stages. Real-time codec auditioning previews your mix through different encoding schemes and quality settings.

Loudness

Playout services have a ‘letter box’ through which they deliver your audio. If you’re lucky it slides through; if not, the service will force it to fit .A heavily maximized master might win the loudness war on CD, but could simply be turned down on your music service or player. This leaves valuable headroom you could have used for transient detail and punch. With MasterCheck’s Loudness and PLR features you can find the sweet spot between perceived loudness and dynamics, perfectly tuning your master to the format.

Codecs

The major online music services and stores encode your music in various formats, often using different bit-rates depending on your device or account type. Encoding “hot” mixes can often introduce true peak overs that will clip on playback. MasterCheck will detect these errors, allowing you to stay within a safe limit. You’ll also be able to hear any obvious frequency masking or other artifacts, and try to mitigate these effects at the mixing and mastering stages.

Applications

Music Mastering

Mastering for digital music services

Mastering for podcasts and digital radio

Codec distortion detection

Loudness and dynamics comparison with reference material

Music Mixing

Dynamic Range Measurement

Loudness matching across album tracks

FX chain auditioning with matched loudness

Preparation for Mastering

Service Presets include:

Spotify

Apple Music

YouTube

Pandora

BBC iPlayer

Tidal

TV Europe

TV USA

TV Japan

AES

DAB+ Radio

Industry Standard Metering include:

Program Loudness

Short Term Loudness

PLR (Peak to Loudness Ratio) dynamic range

ITU compliant inter-sample peak

Realtime Preview

Loudness Adjustments (Level Trim and Peak Limiting)

Audio Codecs

Reference & Comparison

Features

Simultaneous metering of reference track with mix

Reference monitoring (A/B)

Loudness matching

A/B Pre/Post Mix Master FX with matched loudness

System Requirements

Support for AAX, VST, VST3, AU and AudioSuite in both 64-bit and 32-bit versions. RTAS is also available as 32-bit only.